I like to consider myself a pretty positive “glass half full” kinda gal. Aside from the occasional explosion of built up sadness resulting from an age old insecurity or the playing of the Holiday classic “Christmas Shoes,” my every day life consists of pretty level emotions. I think….

This quality of level headedness has served me well and allowed me to get through most weeks unscathed.  However, this Monday my emotions apparently felt ignored and decided to make themselves known with an extravagant entrance and absolutely no warning.

So I’m in my Monday voice lesson, working on all of my material for my Jury (a Jury is what they call our final in this class). And as I’m singing my first piece, my accompanist stops playing and says, “Could you breathe before you sing?”

My brain heard exactly that, “Could you breathe before you sing?” But APPARENTLY my emotions translated this simple statement as, “You are the worst singer in the entire world, you will never succeed in this business, and you are also fat and smelly.” 

In my mind, I knew he wanted me to breathe more visibly so that he could follow my singing accordingly.

But in my heart, he wanted me to stop breathing altogether so that I would drop dead and quit stealing air from those who are worthy of sweet sweet existence.

So I start the song over. But before I could even get to the chorus I feel something bubbling up in my throat. The emotions. The tears. The horror.

Oh. no.

And then before I knew it, one single cry escaped from my being and I was sobbing. Literally. Uncontrollably. Sobbing. Like picture the Big Bang, and then change it to a personification of tears, and you’ve got a pretty accurate description of me on Monday.

And anyone who knows me knows that once it begins, it doesn’t stop. The nature of my crying is like the thought of demon possession before going to sleep–once you invite those thoughts in you can’t get rid of them…and the more you tell yourself, This isn’t real, the more you find yourself thinking, This is it. This is the night i’m going to be possessed by the devil.

And the worst part is that both my voice coach and my accompanist are men, so they could only console me with their words. So just imagine me, standing in the middle of this room, face in my hands, sobbing, and having two grown men repeating, “It’s going to be okay” over and over again while remaining at the appropriate physical distance.

Bless it.

 

I think I made things worse because I kept telling them that I had no reason to cry. I literally didn’t. This semester has been wonderful. But all I could think was….

Why am I crying? 

Why am I wearing this outfit?

Why do they call this final a “jury” if my voice teacher keeps telling me the point isn’t to judge me? Isn’t a jury by definition designed to judge someone?

Ugh.

So anyways, I finally stopped crying. Thank God. And (surprise, surprise) my voice lesson ended early. I guess the moral of this story is to confront your emotions so they don’t hate you and make themselves known at the absolute worst of times.

Like John Lennon said, “The one thing you can’t hide is when you cripple inside.”

You speak to my soul, Mr. Lennon.

Xoxo,

Emma